Ask Lemmy

Beltain - Wild In The West

My grandparents knew the guy that produced this music video for a local band. I'm pretty sure the VHS copy they had was one of few in existence. It's been on YouTube for over a decade and only has 122 views, but it's a gem.

I recently worked my way through the old games library on archive.org and found some gems I used to play.
The game that got me looking there in the first place was Lost Dutchman Mine (still holds up!), but then I just kept scrolling and have bookmarked dozens of games. I won't list them all, but some favourites I grew up playing (and still occasionally revisit) that I don't think were massively (or at least still would be) well known:
Xonix - the first pc game I ever played, back when monitors only had 2 colours lol
Jones in the Fast Lane The Sims if it was a board game
Mario is Missing Yes, the Mario. I was the only person I know to own and play this game
Home alone and Home Alone 2 both on 5¼-inch floppy
Goblins I never got far in this game as a kid, and I have resorted to digging up the walkthrough even today to progress lol

Not a game, there is also Jerry Springer the Opera, a satire which I feel went far too low under the radar, and more people should watch (I think most people assume that the first act - a mock up JS episode, is all it is, but it really isn't). I've listened to it so many times I can literally sing you the whole thing from beginning to end (OST is much better quality than the live recording, and is on YT too). 😂(CW: contains some outdated and offensive terms and slurs)
E: here's a no-spoiler taste, the ad break
Edit again (I'm now re-watching it and this part just came up and reminded me lol): some folks here might be familiar with I Just Wanna Fuckin' Dance, which is from the opera!

There are probably many more, but I've just woken up, so that's all that comes to mind rn..

Okay, here's one: Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Action Game. Not the SCUMM engine adventure game made by LucasArts, no I'm talking about the godawful action platformer that Tiertex smeared across every console and home computer of the early 90's like shit across the handicap stall in the men's room of a Ruby Tuesday. I knew it as the particularly heinous MS-DOS port but they put it on everything from the Commodore 64 to the Game Boy.

The controls are bad, the mechanics don't make sense, the level design is bullshit, the enemy design and placement is unfair, the graphics are mediocre, the audio is bad to horrible depending on the port...it has no redeeming qualities.

I hope it's obscure because lord it deserves to be forgotten. How do you take a white hot license like Indiana Jones and fuck it up so comprehensively?

Nerve Damage, a game that was I think made on a random gamejam, and the whole premise is to make a game that's actively trying to be as uncomfortable as possible to play, while also getting you into the flow and actually makes you enjoy it.

Unfortunately, I didn't find how to play it, and it didn't release as far as I know. I've heard about it on some kind of GDC presentation about Innovative/Obscure game design.

While that actually means that someone has indeed heard of, I've never met anyone else who got to play it. Or heard about it.

Eternal Champions. An old fighting game for Sega. I've never met anybody in real life who has heard of it. It was so awesome. Xavier was the shit.

25+ years ago there was a release on some Warez sites called “beer police”.

From what I remember, It was a game set in some future sci-fi world with flying cars with a 5th element vibe.

Only ever saw it for a few hours at a mates house, so my memory is sketchy, but I’ve never found any other mention of it.

Movies:

• Kubo and the Two Strings. Some of the story elements are a bit too obvious, but the overall story is charming and the art style (stop motion with puppet-like characters) is just plain cool.

• Kirikou and the Sorceress. Wonderfully weird with an interesting story

• Triplets of Belleville. The entire movie is "told" without words, except for a single sentence right at the start and one right at the end.

Games:

• Terranigma (SNES). Main characters revives / creates an entire world that was doomed ages ago. It's kind of bittersweet when you're done reviving the continents, plants and animals and then the humans start f*cking stuff up. Great music and visuals too, despite being 16-Bit style

• Ōkami. One of my all-time favorites but due to minimal marketing, not many people are aware that this game even exists. Charming art style and interesting gameplay concept.

I have never met anybody else who played the Wall-E game for Wii.

The movie Tampopo, about ramen. Great film.

Starsiege. No, not tribes. Starsiege, third game in the earthsiege series. Tribes was actually a spin off in the same universe that got much more popular (with good reason, tribes was awesome).

Starsiege was a pc game that came in a bigass box, complete with multiple books filled with lore from the game's universe. It wasn't as well received as mech warrior (another mech sim), so it didn't have a big community. But those of us that played it loved it to death. I think you can still get the game running if you don't mind fucking with a bunch of sketchy third party patches.

The Belgian 80's metal band Ostrogoth.

Their website doesn't exist anymore and the only band-run social media page is on Facebook.

If you're a fan of retro heavy metal, give them a listen! They still tour, though you won't be finding much about it online.

Arx Fatalis for og Xbox. I have it and haven't played it, but nobody I know has ever heard about it.

An old MS-DOS game from the 90s called Solar Winds, by Epic Megagames. It was top down and you flew around battling spaceships and doing missions in space. I absolutely loved it as a kid. Pretty sure you can get it for free now.

Actually yes hereit is https://www.playdosgames.com/online/solar-winds/

My girlfriend in high school introduced me to Fishing with John and it's comedy gold. Way before Tim and Eric and all the other absurdist comedy shows. I highly recommend it!

Ok so I don't know the name of it. But it was a sidescroller shooter game for the Sega Genesis. You played as like a kid and blasted enemies and there were upgrades. I think it had gun in the name.

Edit: I was right it did have gun in the name

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunstar_Heroes

When I was little my parents had an Amiga 500 computer. My mother was never into gaming except for one. It was a boulder-dash clone called "Emerald Mine" (in which you collected emeralds, not diamonds) made my an obscure German studio. I think it was never widely spread and mostly stayed within Western Eu, but who knows, I might be wrong.

All from the early 90's...

Life and Death II: The Brain - An old DOS medical game

Deadlock: Planetary Conquest- a competitive SimCity-like game

The Dagger of Amon Ra - A point and click mystery adventure game

Edit: added subtitle to Deadlock and video links

Decades ago, my dad bought a PC that came with a free CD for a game called Retribution. The box art looked unlike anything I'd ever seen before (basically 3D graphics at a time when the Mega Drive reigned supreme). Sadly, the disc didn't work, but I've tried to get my hands on a copy, to no avail.

Looking at the graphics now, they weren't even that good...but for the mid-nineties for a small child, absolutely amazing.

There was a door (plugin) for The text-based *BBS game Legend of the Red Dragon called Violet's Tavern.

You could sit at the bar and buy a drink that enhanced your stats, You could go upstairs and pay for a hooker to replenish your energy or you could try to seduce the barmaid / owner and actually have kind of a sweet encounter with her.

It had a betting mechanic I don't remember if it was blackjack, dice or what but you could game it a little bit by throwing a shit ton of money at it a few times. The initial odds to win or somewhat higher than the extended odds to win so if you hit it and hit big you just walk away. Sometimes you ended up empty but more often than not it worked.

Hand of Manos. Most likely thee worst movie ever made. I found it for a screen writing class. The assignment was watch a bad movie then present it to the class. Easiest A+ of my fucking life.

Another weird one is, there used to be a sex Tetris type game for Windows 98 or earlier. Little naked people would drop down and when you got a full line they would jump off the screen. I don't know how that got on the family PC, but it was on it. I played it. So there's that.

The Wii U failed with few units sold. Star Fox Zero released for the Wii U sold much worse than any other Wii U game. But it's really good - Motion controls are amazing plus the two player co-op where one flys and the other guns is very fun

On the Internet, everything is fundamentally both obscure yet ubiquitous, or so it seems. But in real life, there are at least 2 things that seem to be obscure to the point that people don't believe me when I mention it:

1. A Super Nintendo game released in the US as Super Ninja Boy. It was a follow-up to (or maybe remake of) Little Ninja Brothers on the NES. I've even been told that I was confused and that I'm probably thinking of Legend of the Mystical Ninja.

2. On the original Playstation, there used to be a series of demo discs that would have "hidden" features on them if you pressed the right button(s). One of those demo discs had the entire music video for Usher's song "Pony" and other than randos on the internet and my friends/family who saw it with me, I've never met anybody that remembers it. If anybody here does remember that demo disc, I think there was another hidden music video on there, I vaguely remember a band, with various shots of the drummer wearing black athletic-type shorts with a white band around the leg but beyond that I really do not recall.

When I was a kid I went to a Primus show and they were playing music before the acts came on. One was “Smoke On The Water” covered by Tom Jones and I’ve never been able to find it or even any information about it. I know it was this song and artist as I asked the engineer, it was a great rendition and I wish I could find a copy

I am looking for a sci-fi story that I read in the 80's. It was a story about the future and I am sorry but the only vivid detail I remember was that parents had actually gone to a store to purchase a gift (a bicycle I believe), and the person at the store thought it was strange to have people actually come to the store, but let them in to shop.

https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/50126/what-short-story-has-a-future-bicycle-shop-owner-surprised-when-two-parents-actu

I recorded a film off the tv channel Sy-Fy a few years backcalled AfterDeath (not the 2023 film that comes up in a search). It's possibly not that obscure, but I believe it was a low budget film so maybe not at all well known. Anyhow, it didn't record all the film for some reason so I have never seen the end (last 15min or so), but despite the clear lack of quality it had an interesting premise (a group of young people who wake up in a beach cabin but apparently in the middle of some quasi-nowhere). I was intrigued as to how the approach to playing out the scenario would end but maybe I enjoyed it more for not having been able to see the ending if it was z bad one!

Alter Aeon is a fun MUD with multiclassing. I love my wizard / cleric / thief

They also have a nice wiki

There was a game I played on my grandma's TurboGrafx 16 many years ago. I cannot remember the name, and searching over the years still has me befuddled.

It was a racing game, but with an RPG element where you had to continually upgrade your car and take on local race champs. I loved it and cannot for the life of me find the damn thing.

Edit: holy shit I think I found it. Final Lap Twin

Temple of Apshai

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_of_Apshai

You've never heard of it, and modern RPGs wouldn't exist without it.

I used to have this game for the NES called Xexyz. It was this really strange game that tried to be several different genres in one, and I actually had a ton of fun with as a kid. I don't think I've ever met anybody else who has ever heard of this game, let alone played or enjoyed it. I'm not even super sure how I came to owning it in the first place; I think it was in a box of random games my aunt got from a flea market at one point, maybe.

If any of you are sitting on an NES emulator with an archive of every official ROM and haven't tried this game, it's definitely worth checking out. Weird little gem that nobody seems to know about, it seems.

Two movies from the 90s... "Ruben and Ed," and "... And God Spoke."

And God Spoke was a revelation the first dozen times i watched it, it was full of tiny little blink-and-you'll-miss-them moments. Haven't seen it in years.

Ruben and Ed is just surreal, with at least two scenes that have stuck in my head lo these thirty years.

There was this PC FMV game back in the early 90's where there's this woman doing all kinds of things that gets herself killed and all you do is flip the right switches at the right time and enter 3 digit codes.

One of the earlier games I had on a CD-ROM. Back then it wasn't a disc tray. You eject an entire disc jewelcase-like thing and put your cd inside the case and shove it back in like a floppy disk.

I saw Repo! The Genetic Opera when it came out in 2008. It's an opera, very little dialouge, if any, I haven't watched it in a while. Paris Hilton has a main role.

https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/14353-repo-the-genetic-opera

Back in the heyday of flash videos and before youtube, there was a clerks spoof featuring marvel comics heroes that I remember as being enjoyable, clever, and ultimately just a good tribute/ripoff of the source material. I have no idea how to find that again.

My dad brought home "Xexyz" for NES one year. I have never heard anyone ever reference this game in any nostalgia reviews and had to actually go look up the name myself after vaguely remembering it as that side-scroling NES game that started with an x.